Game Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 3)

by T'Gracie Reese

  Had probably, in fact, been given a key to it.

  Because he’d been a friend of the senator’s.

  Even though the senator had not known it.

  She forced herself to take a sip of the glass of port Lirpa had given her and said, quietly:

  “I can’t claim that I’ve figured it out, Max. Not all of it. Not the inner workings of it.”

  “Ah, but who could make such a claim? The inner workings of the human mind…no, who could make such a claim?”

  The wind was freshening; they could hear it begin to sing around the corners of the yacht.

  “I was in the police car. Moon showed me the report. It had the name LIRPA typed in large letters on top of it. I just kept staring at it. Finally things began to make sense.”

  “I’m glad they did. It would have been difficult to explain. Difficult to put into words. At least, the words we commonly use.”

  “April backwards is Lirpa. That was the only name you could have given yourself; you were her mirror opposite.”

  “Yes. No choice about the name. Max Lirpa. Maximum InsideoutApril!”

  “And that day when you told me you were ‘conceived in Oxford,’ I didn’t really understand.”

  “Nor would I have expected you to.”

  “When April said she had ‘come to know you during university days,’ she meant The University of Mississippi. Oxford, Mississippi.”

  “Yes, I…I came into being there.”

  “April’s alter-ego.”

  “I suppose the doctors might call it that. ‘But that was in another country; and besides, the wench is dead.’”

  “You killed her.”

  He shook his head.

  “No. I willed her out of being. Two entities in one body. It could not have lasted forever. And I proved the stronger.”

  Silence for a time.

  “Like Psycho,” said Nina.

  He frowned.

  “I hate that film. Completely unbelievable. And so much blood. So much violence.”

  Then he said quietly:

  “The most difficult battles are not fought with knives.”

  Nina knew nothing to say to that. She thought for a time and finally whispered, more to herself than to the figure sitting opposite her:

  “I was so crazy. I was worrying about what would happen when April van Osdale might come into the building and run into this wild Max Lirpa. But that was never going to happen, was it?”

  “No. At least not in the way that you had imagined. In another way, of course, it was happening all the time. Right under your nose.”

  “Right under all our noses. And the reason I could never seem to call April in her Hattiesburg office was not that she was in high-level meetings; it was simply that she—being you—was in Room 102. Everybody around southwest Mississippi thought that she was somewhere else. Which I guess was true.”

  “I suppose when one thinks about it, it’s not too uncommon. There’s a bit of the April/Max conflict in all human beings. The measurer and the romantic. She’s a very dangerous kind of person, you know. She would rob the world of its mystery. And ultimately of its beauty.”

  “Goldmann Bristow said that April was deeply disturbed. Classic paranoid/schizophrenic.”

  He chuckled.

  “Poor April. She suffered a great deal. She wanted everything to be perfect. And that striving…well, it called me forth, so to speak. I am the mirror opposite of schizophrenic paranoia; I am hemophilic/adenoia. And, by the way, I remember quite clearly working with you at the university.”

  “You already existed at that time?”

  “Yes. In not quite so tangible a form. But yes.”

  “Why didn’t April remember me?”

  “Because of who you are. Your love of true literature. Of true poetry. You represented everything she detested. And so she shut out the very memory of you.”

  “You kept that memory.”

  “Yes, but for obvious reasons I couldn’t tell you about it.”

  “No, I suppose not. But…I still have to ask you…”

  “Yes, yes, dear lady, ask away!”

  “Why the games? The test? The trip out to the island?”

  “Isn’t it an enchanting place? Tom Broussard took me out there fishing some weeks ago. I knew at that time, of course, that I was going to win. I decided it would be the perfect place to have April’s ‘burial.’”

  “But why me and Penn?”

  “Simply because you are the two most formidable ladies that I know. And because ceremonies require witnesses. Did I not hear, did not the talk around the school make clear, that you are going in some months to a gothic romantic settlement to commemorate the nuptials of your best friend?”

  “Yes. To Candles. I’m to be Margot’s Best Woman.”

  “Exactly! Weddings, funerals…they are society’s way of measuring passages, changes.”

  He poured another glass of port, drank from it, and said quietly:

  “This is only another…well, I think you would call it a GAME CHANGE. Only another movement from one stage of being to another.”

  “And the standardized tests?”

  He brightened:

  “Wasn’t that a splendid notion on my part? I was in and out of the office all the time, of course, and so had no problem dropping them into your mail box. They were life and death to her. So it was only appropriate that they would play a final role in announcing her life and death.”

  Somewhere out in the ocean a tanker brayed.

  “Do you think she will come back?”

  “No. She’s gone. I can’t tell you how I know that. But I do.”

  Silence for a time, or as near to silence as the ocean offers.

  The moon had risen; the water sparkled.

  “Max,” she said, “you know what needs to happen now.”

  He nodded.

  “I think so.”

  “And it’s not suicide. You don’t need to jump into the ocean.”

  “I suppose not. But it was such an inviting thought.”

  “We can’t lose you. The world can’t lose you.”

  “I’m not absolutely certain that the world has ever had me.”

  “You suffered from multiple identities. I’m not even a psychiatrist, and I know that much.”

  “It is a bit easier to know of such things than to suffer from them.”

  “I’m sure it is. But you can be…”

  “Cured?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, God how I hate that thought! What a terrible fate, to be ‘cured.’ It sounds like a ham.”

  She looked at the officers ringing the room.

  None of them were smiling.

  Just not a good night, she found herself thinking, for humor.

  “Do you want me,” she asked, “to go with you into town?”

  He brightened.

  “I would like that. It would mean a great deal to me.”

  “Then I’ll do it. It’s all right isn’t it, Moon?”

  She looked at him; he nodded.

  “I’m sure it will be fine, Ms. Bannister.”

  “You understand don’t you, Moon, that Mr. Lirpa has not actually harmed anyone?”

  “If you know it, ma’am, then I believe it. You always seem to be two steps ahead of the rest of us. Even with Eve Ivory and the Reddington fellow…”

  She shook her head:

  “Those were different. Very different.”

  And not, she found herself thinking, so very different.

  Two bad beings, two threats to the community, had been eliminated.

  Someone innocent had been accused, believed guilty, and ultimately would be exonerated.

  The community was saved.

  Had not that happened here?

  Yes, but with one exception.

  There had not been another Eve Ivory in Bay St. Lucy, nor another Reddington.

  But there would be more April van Osdales.

  Others who did not understand
the Grand Mystery of Things, and who wanted to tell people…the artists and seafarers of Bay St. Lucy, of all beings!—how to chart and diagram and measure all humanity.

  Even the sea itself could not keep them out.

  Well. That was for tomorrow.

  “Are you ready, Max? Once we get into town I’ll call Margot and Goldmann. He’s a leading psychologist. I’m sure he can be here by tomorrow morning.”

  “And do you trust him, Dear Lady?”

  “I trust both of them. And you will too, I promise.”

  “Then so be it. Let us go.”

  And they did.

  Three hours later, at four AM, she’d finished walking on the beach and was returning to her shack, still deep in conversation. She had conversed about the new job that Margot had offered her, and whether she should remain a principal, and how improbable and remarkable her victory Friday night had been, and how utterly exhilarating the kayak trip had been, and how fine and beautiful the trip to The Candles would be…

  …and he had remarked about the incomprehensible case of April van Osdale.

  …to which she had remarked, that it was not incomprehensible at all.

  “Why not, Nina?”

  “Because she had two people living inside her, Frank. And so do I.”

  Then she said good night, waved at his image as it faded beyond the moon, turned, and went to bed.

  EPILOGUE

  “The past is never dead. In fact, it isn't even past.”

  ––William Faulkner

  Looking back upon her memories of the dreamlike days in early May—which Nina Bannister was to do often in the weeks and months to come—the most striking thing about her initial impressions of The Candles Plantation was that they did not concern the building itself. They did not concern the deep, blue-board walkways that surrounded it and offered the inhabitants of each room a place to sit, and rock, and sip, and experience life in what had once been the headquarters of a thriving agricultural enterprise and had since become a mausoleum; they did not concern the great shambling polar bear that masqueraded as a dog, wagging its tail slowly and dutifully, as though eschewing the purpose of all other tail wagging and accepting the daily responsibility of driving flies away from the doors and windows of the downstairs residents.

  Rather, they all centered on a rain-stained wooden table in the front yard, shaded by massive oaks that masked a fast disappearing evening sun, and rocking ever so gently on the soft turf of the lawn each time one of the three or four wedding guests seated around it happened to lift or replace a glass of champagne, or a snifter of cognac.

  But the building was always there, in background if not center, always acting as a base for everything else.

  This building smiled. Every part of it. The color of its exterior walls—a soft and mellow off-peach which was the precise color of slanted sunlight on a late Sunday afternoon—this color smiled. The broad porch smiled at the white and motionless rocking chairs which sat upon it, while they smiled, in turn, at the dilapidated out buildings, which smiled at the rusted farm machinery and antiquated carriages that sat within them. And from the well in the middle of the back yard, its wooden frame apparently on the point of disintegrating with age and dropping into water far beneath ground level the bucket which hung gleaming in the dying light—from the very moss-covered stones rising above this well, there emanated a kind of benevolence, as though coming out of the deep earth itself, seeping over the lawns and fall gardens, and settling quietly at dusk into the not very recently mown grass.

  She was to think of these things often as she remembered Margot’s wedding.

  And she was to remember the wedding guests, all in formal wear, all milling about the grounds, all mixing with the ghosts that haunted Candles.

  They were of all ages; but they might as well have been of all centuries, wearing starched and pale gray civil war uniforms instead of coal black tuxedoes and wedding gowns.

  For…

  …“The past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite reaches, divided from us now by the narrow bottleneck of the most recent decade of years.”

  She was to remember the conversations on the grounds, just before the wedding itself.

  Conversations with Meg and Jenny:

  “You didn’t quite win state, Nina. But you got there.”

  “We won Pickett’s Charge. But the North of Mississippi was ten points too much for us. You’ll get them next year!”

  For Meg had, of course, been hired back as coach.

  And Nina had resigned two weeks ago as principal.

  She would, beginning in June, run Elementals.

  She remembered the conversation with Bristow concerning his most storied patient, Max Lirpa:

  “He’s doing fine. He suffered a great mental trauma. But he feels it was a victory. He pulled away from a part of himself that he hated, and formed a new self. It can happen. We heal.”

  And she would remember the ceremony itself.

  Margot so resplendent as a bride.

  The five of them: Bristow’s best friend and Best Man; she herself as Maid of Honor; Margot, Goldmann…

  …and the minister, asking:

  “And do you, Margot, take this man to be your wedded husband?”

  Margot smiling at Nina, who nodded and said, quietly:

  “Game Change.”

  “I do.”

  “Then I now pronounce you man and wife.”

  Those were then the things that she would remember.

  For the rest of her life.

  THE END

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Pam Britton (T’Gracie) Reese is an Assistant Professor in the Communication Science and Disorders Department at Indiana-Purdue University Fort Wayne. Previously, she worked as a speech pathologist in schools in private practice. She was also a supervisor in communication disorders at Ohio University. She likes nothing better, professionally, than helping small, silent two year old boys start talking. She has also published books about autism with LinguiSystems for the last 15 years. The Circle of Autism was previously published on-line at ken*again e-magazine

  Joe Reese is a novelist, playwright, storyteller, and college teacher. He has published four novels, several plays, and a number of stories and articles. When he is not teaching (English and German), he enjoys visiting elementary schools, where he tells stories from his Katie Dee novels and talks to students about writing. He and his wife Pam have three children: Kate, Matthew, and Sam.

  If you enjoyed this book, please consider posting a review on your favorite retailer’s website.

  For more Cozy Cat Press books, visit our website at: www.cozycatpress.com